Yeah, definitely surprising, but genius in any form is surprising.
There is an essay here by a former student that gives a sense of how she taught. And Philip Glass describes her as the decisive influence on him in this article, which also talks about her teaching a little.
It was Nadia’s manner rather than her materials that was unique. Her intensity, her emotional involvement with her students, her broad knowledge of music in general, and her ability to project her own passionate enthusiasm for each detail as well as its over-all form, were the qualities that made her extraordinary. Her electric personality brought a distinctiveness to everything that Nadia did. In this, lies what one reviewer called “the difference between good teaching and great teaching,” for in the latter “the student feels that the teaching enacts an extraordinarily intimate and demanding relation between the teacher and his subject, a relation such that the teacher’s sense of his subject is indistinguishable from his sense of life.”
Yeah, definitely surprising, but genius in any form is surprising.
There is an essay here by a former student that gives a sense of how she taught. And Philip Glass describes her as the decisive influence on him in this article, which also talks about her teaching a little.
Here’s an interesting passage from Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music:
It was Nadia’s manner rather than her materials that was unique. Her intensity, her emotional involvement with her students, her broad knowledge of music in general, and her ability to project her own passionate enthusiasm for each detail as well as its over-all form, were the qualities that made her extraordinary. Her electric personality brought a distinctiveness to everything that Nadia did. In this, lies what one reviewer called “the difference between good teaching and great teaching,” for in the latter “the student feels that the teaching enacts an extraordinarily intimate and demanding relation between the teacher and his subject, a relation such that the teacher’s sense of his subject is indistinguishable from his sense of life.”